Widespread Amazon cloud service outage disables Roombas, Ring doorbells, even Christmas lights

A large-scale outage on Amazon's cloud service this week wreaked widespread havoc on websites and software services. In addition to disabling Flickr, Adobe and the Washington Post's website, the outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday caused Roombas, Rokus, Ring doorbells and other smart household appliances to stop functioning. The issue, which impacted the US East-1 region, sent Twitter users into a tizzy. 'My f---ing doorbell doesn't work because AWS us-east-1 is having issues,' tweeted one disgruntled Ring user. 'I... can't vacuum... because us-east-1 is down,' complained Geoff Belknap, Chief Information Security Officer for LinkedIn.